Reexamining the Stability of British Naval Mastery 1692-1815 (II)
Arsenals
Another factor favoring British naval dominance was the sunk economic cost aspiring naval powers had to pay to build the land-based infrastructure needed to build, maintain and operate large fleets. Naval arsenals were the largest industrial establishments in pre-modern Europe and were costly and difficult to build. Having developed gradually as a naval power, Great Britain bore the costs of building a naval infrastructure over the course of several centuries. Portsmouth had been built during the reign of Henry VII, Woolwich and Deptford under Henry VIII, Chatham under Elisabeth I and Plymouth under the Commonwealth. Also, Britain’s naval arsenals could specialize owing to Britain’s command of the sea. Other established naval powers, such as the Netherlands and Spain, likewise developed their naval infrastructure over time.
However, Britain’s principal maritime rival, France, had to build a maritime infrastructure from scratch. The costs of building this infrastructure delayed and enervated France’s naval buildup and the inadequacy of the infrastructure once completed constrained the operations of French fleets and limited the durability of French ships.
The origins of a standing French Navy date back to the reign of Louis XIII and the policies of Cardinal Richelieu. At first, despite its wealth and natural endowments, France lacked shipyards capable of building warships and supporting naval operations. To rectify this problem, Richelieu initially intended to build four significant naval bases: Toulon in the Mediterranean; Brouage on the Bay of Biscay; Brest on the Atlantic Ocean; and Le Havre on the English Channel .
However, financial and technical problems dogged Richelieu’s infrastructure projects. It was tremendously expensive building fortified ports from scratch and two of the sites for Richelieu’s four ports were ill chosen due to faulty hydrographic analyses. In 1635, construction work at Brouage alone cost as much as it would to build nine galleys from scratch and between two-thirds and five-sixths as much as the annual operating and maintenance budget for France’s fleet of 25 galleys. Despite this expense, Brouage was a catastrophic choice for an arsenal because it was hydrographically impossible to prevent the narrow canal linking the arsenal to the sea from shoaling. Le Havre, for its part, was useless as a naval base because tides and the harbor entrance rendered it virtually impossible for large fleets to enter or leave the harbor.
Faced with the cost and limited success of his infrastructure projects and France’s imperative need for a navy for its war with Spain (1635-59), Richelieu shifted his investments from infrastructure to ships. Although only Brest was completed as a successful arsenal, Richelieu bought a respectable fleet of 60 sailing warships and 25 galleys from commercial and foreign shipyards. However, all but twenty sailing warships and six galleys of Richelieu’s of quickly-built fleet rotted away between 1649 and 1653 because they were maintained by an inadequate shore establishment.
When Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Batiste Colbert attempted to reinvigorate France’s ailing naval program, he faced Richelieu’s same problem of developing an adequate naval infrastructure. Colbert also faced Richelieu’s dilemma of building a fleet while developing France’s naval infrastructure. Ultimately, Colbert spent twice as much on shipbuilding than naval arsenals and although France spent a colossal 216 million livres on its navy between 1672 and 1690, not enough went into infrastructure.
Although two new naval arsenals were completed, at Toulon and Rochefort, facilities to maintain and repair ships were neglected, such that by in 1700 France did not have any functioning dry docks while England had 16. Moreover, France failed to develop a dedicated naval arsenal on the Channel Coast. Although Colbert invested heavily in Le Havre, the port’s inherent defects subsisted, preventing it from ever supporting naval operations.
An expensive although modest proposal by Vauban to turn Cherbourg into a fortified base for light warships and privateers was scrapped as war approached in 1688.
Without adequate dry docks or a channel port, France could neither safely operate its ships in the English Channel during wars nor properly maintain them during peace. The former defect meant that, once defeated in Channel waters as at the Battle of Barfleur in 1692, stricken French warships had nowhere to take refuge and were burnt in unfortified bays near Cherbourg and St. Vaast-la-Hogue. The latter defect consigned French ships to premature retirement. Whereas properly cared-for warships could last 40 years or more, the French Navy assumed that warships had to be replaced on average every 12 years. Although France built a fleets relatively quickly, French warships rotted and had to be replaced much more frequently than their British or Spanish counterparts.
In addition to having to build a complete network of fortified harbours and arsenals from scratch, France could not achieve the economies of scale of the British. Because the British Royal Navy generally controlled Britain’s coastal waters, British arsenals could specialize. Ships could be built and stored at Chatham, armed and manned at Sheerness and deployed to Plymouth, yet sent back to Portsmouth when in need of minor repairs. Because France could not count on safely sending unarmed or under-manned ships from one port to another, each naval arsenal had to be entirely self-sufficient. As a result, they duplicated one another’s functions and capabilities, and the smallest French naval arsenal nearly as large a workforce as the largest British shore establishment.
Besides obliging them to duplicate productive capabilities, Britain’s naval preeminence also saddled its opponents with the cost of building, maintaining and manning large fortifications designed to protect their naval bases. Being inferior at sea, Britain’s opponents never managed to attack a naval base on British soil during the period between 1688 and 1815. Contrarily, the British Royal Navy regularly bombarded or launched amphibious assaults on French and Spanish navy yards. In 1693 and 1695 St. Malo was bombarded, in 1702 Cadiz was attacked, in 1707 Toulon suffered the same fate, in 1746 Lorient was the target and in 1757 Rochefort’s turn came. Although none of these operations accomplished all of its objectives, they forced France and Spain to divert men and money from their fleets and into the defence of their ports.
In sum, British naval superiority enabled the United Kingdom to economize on the defence of its arsenals and realize economies of scale unachievable by its rivals. Contrarily, British sea power obliged France and Spain to develop heavily fortified autarchic arsenals. Moreover, the need to quickly build a network of ports and arsenals impeded France’s development as a naval power and the insufficiency of France’s naval infrastructure, once completed, hobbled both the operations and upkeep of the fleet.
Sailors
Another area where Britain’s maritime rivals were disadvantaged by late development was in the supply of sailors. Pre-industrial navies could not train their own sailors. The manning requirements of large fleets combined with the time it took to train capable sailors forced navies to mobilize merchant seamen for war. As French Navy Minister, Jean-Fréderic Phélypeaux, the Count of Maurepas wrote to King Louis XV in the 1730s, “It is extremely important to support commerce if we want to increase our number of sailors. The king, all-powerful as he may be, cannot generate the number [of sailors] that he needs. It is businessmen who create them and the more that commerce flourishes, the more merchant ships they build, the more products they ship and [ultimately] the more sailors they create. ”
Since warships depended on the merchant marine for seamen, states had a vested interest in possessing large merchant marines and crippling those of their potential rivals. As Lord Haversham observed in 1714, “Your trade is the mother and nurse of your seamen; your seamen are the life of your fleet; and your fleet is the security and protection for your trade.”
To compete in this zero-sum contest for the world’s carrying trade, states had to intervene to protect their commercial interests. To trade in the Mediterranean, states had to protect their ships from the opportunistic depredations of Barbary corsairs. To fish off the Grand Banks of Nova Scotia, states had to build fortified harbours or station warships in northern waters. To trade with the broader non-European world, states needed colonies or, at least, entrepots overseas. Finally, bilateral commercial relations between states were often arbitrated by force.
The naval rationale behind trade policies persuaded even liberal-minded economists, such as Adam Smith, to advocate mercantilist policies. Writing about the Navigation Acts in The Wealth of Nations Smith reflected that,
“The defence of Great Britain, for example, depends very much upon the number of its sailors and shipping. The Act of Navigation [of 1651], therefore, very properly endeavours to give the sailors and the shipping of Great Britain the monopoly of the trade of their own country, in some cases by absolute prohibitions, and in others by heavy burdens upon the shipping of foreign countries . . . . When this Act was made, the Dutch were, and still are, the great carriers of Europe . . . . the most deliberate wisdom would have recommended, the diminution of the naval power ofHolland. ”
Although the Navigation Acts precipitated the Anglo-Dutch Naval Wars and damaged the British economy in absolute terms, Smith argued that, “As defence, however, is of much moreimportance than opulence, the Act of Navigation is, perhaps, the wisest of all commercial regulations ofEngland.”
In a world where fleets of warships and fleets of merchant vessels depended on one another for success, states got caught in virtuous or vicious cycles. States that became naval powers early were able to consolidate trading empires, which bolstered naval power, which in turn enabled them to procure additional commercial advantages. Contrarily, states that built navies later did so with an insufficient pool of sailors. Naval weakness prevented these states from keeping or acquiring colonies and defending their maritime interests. In short, all things being equal, both naval power and naval weakness perpetuated itself.
In Europe, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain developed navies early while France and Russia became maritime powers later. Of the early developers, Portugal and the Netherlands abandoned their efforts to remain first-class naval powers because they lacked the demographic strength to sustain large fleets and were economically ruined by terrestrial invasions. Spain’s merchant marine, likewise, suffered greatly during its seventeenth century wars with England, France and the Netherlands.
Britain, on the other hand, maintained itself as a first-rate naval power and gradually used its naval might to expand its share of global merchant shipping. During the seventeenth century, England enforced its Navigation Acts against the Dutch, acquired Tangier and Bombay from Portugal, conquered Spanish Jamaica and founded colonies in North America. These successes triggered a commercial boom in Britain, which saw London’s population of sailors increase from 3,086 in 1582 to 12,000 in 1702 .
During the eighteenth century Britain continued to increase its share of global commerce. As a result of the War of Spanish Succession, it acquired Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and the right to furnish Spain’s American colonies with slaves and limited quantities of commercial goods. During the Seven Years War, Britain added to its gains by evicting France from Canada and conquering large territories in India. As a result, British commerce flourished and the country’s population of seamen grew from 40,000 sailors in 1702 to approximately 70,000 in 1776.
By possessing command of the sea in wartime, the United Kingdom could reinforce its navy with volunteers or impressed seamen from abroad. During the Seven Years War Dutch and other seafaring peoples readily enlisted in the British Royal Navy. Later, during the Napoleonic Wars, ships commissioned in Plymouth comprised 11 percent foreigners.
Britain’s maritime rivals from 1688 and 1815 had trouble mustering enough sailors to man the large battle fleets of the period. At the end of the eighteenth century, Spain, for example, depended on a nucleus of 5,800 sailors used to the high seas. This number, if anything, had declined since the early seventeenth century, when between seven and nine thousand sailors maintained Spain’s links with its American colonies. In order to compensate for its weakness in ocean-going sailors, Spain conscripted fishermen from coastal villages and barge operators used to plying rivers or river mouths. Even so, Spain could only draw on a pool of 53,147 men with any maritime experience in 1787 to man a fleet requiring 89,350 seamen.
France, for its part, began to build a substantial navy in 1661. Naval Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert attempted to man the French fleet using a system of maritime conscription, which enumerated 50,000 sailors liable for service, including ones involved in coastal shipping and inland shipping. When French naval power collapsed following the War of Spanish Succession, France’s sea-going population contracted to 40,000 sailors. By the outbreak of the French Revolution, France’s seagoing population had expanded to 60,000 men working at sea or on inland waterways . Nevertheless, France still did not have enough seamen to man a large fleet during a long war.
When Russia began to develop as a naval power at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it did so without a merchant marine of any size whatsoever. Although substantial investments in infrastructure and shipbuilding soon enabled Russia to join the ranks of Europe’s naval powers, its dearth of sailors and reliance on serfs conscripted from Russia’s agrarian population prevented the Russian Navy from ever reaching a high degree of operational effectiveness. As an anonymous English naval officer serving in the Russian Navy wrote, “He [the Tsar] has a sufficient number of people tolerably skilled in fixing the rigging and going through all parts of a seaman’s duty to be done ashore, or whilst the ship is in the haven, and yet are good for little at sea; and the great want he is in of good seamen outweighs all other difficulties he has to grapple with. ”
Shortages of capable seamen limited the effectiveness of Britain’s maritime rivals throughout the eighteenth century. Without enough sailors, navies could neither adequately man large fleets nor make good wartime losses. Writing after the Seven Years War, the Duke of Choiseul estimated that France could never man more than 80 ships of the line and 40 frigates, which meant never attaining parity with the British Royal Navy. In the event, France armed at most 70 ships of the line at any given time during the War for American Independence. Because of losses due to sickness and combat the French Navy was unable to man its ships by the end of the war.
During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, French and Spanish naval manpower was clearly inadequate for a struggle with a strengthened British Royal Navy. At the Battle of Cape St. Vincent on 14 February 1797, a smaller British fleet outmanoeuvred and defeated a Spanish fleet fifty-percent larger than itself. In this battle Spanish ships of the line had no more than 60 to 80 trained seamen in each ship’s crew of between 453 and 848 men. With so many soldiers and landsmen aboard, the Spanish fleet manoeuvred haphazardly, prompting the sailing master of the British ship Prince George to observe that “they form’d that Evolution so Ill, that on viewing them with a Seaman’s eye, it was sufficient to inspire us with a confidence of success in spite of the superiority of their numbers. ”
Later, during the Trafalgar Campaign of 1805, French ships lacked from a quarter and a third of the complements of trained seamen they should have had and Spanish ships were worse off. French Navy Minister Admiral Decrès pleaded with Napoleon that France and Spain did not have enough seasoned seamen to man the two countries’ combined fleet. He argued that instead of using all 36 ships available, Napoleon should “choose out the twenty best sailers, the best -found and best-manned . . . authorize the admirals to give preference in all things to these 20 chosen ships, by transfers of captains as well as of picked crews.”
After France’s loss of a further 8,500 sailors at the battles of Trafalgar and Cape Ortegal, it became impossible for France to reconstitute an effective battle fleet. Although Napoleon invested resources and built 70 ships-of-the-line and 71 frigates between 1806 and 1814, he lacked enough sailors to man his ships properly and ultimately provided only 50 experienced sailors for each ship-of-the-line in his largest fleet in the Scheldt. Writing in 1811 of this situation, the captain of a French gunboat in the Scheldt observed that, “the seamen [are] too inexperienced as yet to venture to sea; we may therefore look forward to a long sail backwards and forwards in the Scheldt.”
Tactics and Operations
While a dearth of sailors bedevilled Britain’s maritime rivals between 1688 and 1815, Britain’s rivals failed to capitalize on even the few occasions when they confronted the British Royal Navy with fleets of equal or superior numbers and ability. The French Navy either outmanoeuvred or outfought their British opponents at Bantry Bay in 1689, Beachy Head in 1690, Majorca in 1756, Ushant in 1778 and the Chesapeake in 1780. Nevertheless, not one of these battles altered the overall naval balance of power between France and Britain and only one, Beachy Head, saw the French capture or sink any enemy ships.
In contrast to these bloodless victories, the British Royal Navy regularly inflicted telling defeats on its enemies. At Barfleur and St. Vaast-la-Hogue in 1692, Quiberon Bay in 1759, the Saints in 1782, off Ushant on 1 June 1794 and near Cape Trafalgar in 1805, the British Royal Navy inflicted losses on their opponents that altered the strategic balance of forces at a stroke and oftentimes forced its opponents to abandon “blue-water” naval operations. While Britain destroyed or captured 53 enemy ships of the line as a result of the five battles listed above, the French destroyed or captured only 11 ships over the course of their five victories and all of these at the Battle of Beachy Head.
Why is it that the French Navy won bloodless victories while its British counterpart transformed tactical victories into operational blows? To answer this question, it has to be kept in mind that the French Navy was inferior to the British Navy during most of the period it took to build it from 1661 to 1689 and throughout all of the eighteenth century. As an inferior naval power, the French developed tactics designed to maintain a fleet in being. These tactics proved inflexible when favourable situations presented themselves.
Unlike a land army, an inferior fleet at sea could not take advantage of favourable terrain or fortifications to compensate for its weakness. As the French naval theorist Paul Hoste wrote in 1697, “When a land army is inferior, it entrenches itself, occupies advantageous positions and uses woods, rivers and undulations to compensate for what it lacks in force. But at sea there are no advantages save the direction of the wind and that is so inconsistent that it cannot be counted on. A navy is like an army that has been surprised in open terrain without having the time or opportunity to entrench itself. I think that it would be difficult for it to do well if it is greatly inferior to its enemy. ”
Added to the problem of surviving encounters with numerically or qualitatively superior opponents was the fact that, unlike land warfare or present-day naval warfare, an inferior fleet was unlikely to inflict any attrition on its adversary.
On the contrary, in an era where ships rarely sank in battle, the victor of a fleet engagement was likely to end the engagement with all of its ships plus several of the enemy’s. In practical terms, this meant that comparatively minor defeats proved disastrous from a strategic point of view. For example, two relatively minor defeats in 1747 decisively shifted the tide of the naval component of the War of Austrian Succession against France and Spain. In each battle, French fleets lost six ships of the line in their efforts to defend convoys. However, since the British Navy captured all of the ships that the French Navy lost, the net change in the balance forces was 24 ships of the line.
Faced with a situation where it where it was virtually impossible for an inferior French fleet to defeat a superior British opponent and where even minor defeats would disastrously impact the balance of forces, it is only natural that the French Navy developed a tactical mind-set and standard operating procedures designed to preserve their own ships rather than defeat enemy ones.
From a tactical point of view, this meant rigid adherence to fighting from a compact line of battle, which favoured both defensive action and the weaker fleet. As the naval tactician Captain S.F. Bigot de Morogues argued, “Good order and discipline give additional strength to great bodies: if this double advantage is common to all, it’s no less certain that it becomes particularly useful to an inferior body or number as it can tack or wheel about into any form with greater facility than a larger body can do, and that without separating or dis-uniting the several parts. ” Morogues and other French naval officers felt that the compact line of battle was the only formation suited to this purpose.
French ships also developed the practice of shooting high, at an opponent’s masts and rigging from long range instead of concentrating on the hull at short range. Tactically, this enabled French ships to disable enemy ships in order to escape, but limited their ability to kill or maim an adversary’s gun crews in order to capture their ships. The difference in tactical philosophy between the French, who concentrated on hobbling their opponents, and the British, who sought annihilation, was accentuated after the War for American Independence when the British introduced the large-calibre short-barrelled carronade, whose close-range killing power the French refused to emulate for fear of reducing the damage they could inflict on an enemy’s masts and rigging at long range.
Although adopted to compensate for numerical inferiority, the above-mentioned procedures remained in vigor when French fleets confronted numerically equal or inferior British fleets they could have destroyed. On these occasions deeply ingrained tactics and standard operating procedures prevented the French from taking advantage of their superiority to wrest control of the sea away from the British.
The 1779 Battle of Grenada is a case in point. In July, the French Admiral the Count of d’Estaing’s 24 ships of the line escorted an amphibious expedition to attack Grenada. When British Admiral John Byron learned of this expedition, he immediately sailed for Grenada with his 21 ships of the line. Despite being numerically inferior, Byron attacked upon coming into sight. D’Estaing responded with a tightly orchestrated line of battle from which French ships peppered the masts and rigging of their British opponents. Eventually this tactic proved its worth and several of Byron’s dismasted ships drifted away from the battle. At this point, d’Estaing could have cut off Byron’s rearward ships, including three too crippled to maneuver, and possibly annihilated Byron’s fleet. However, doing so entailed abandoning a strict line of battle and coming into close range.
On several other occasions, tactics developed for the purpose of enabling inferior French fleets to escape from superior British ones prevented the French Navy from winning decisive victories when they might have done so. At the 1778 Battle of Ushant, the 1781 Battle of the Chesapeake and possibly the 1689 Battle of Bantry Bay, numerically superior French fleets had the advantage after an initial encounter. However, in each case, they failed to press their advantage.
Ultimately, French tactical practices remained in vigor even when unsuited to the situation at hand. At Trafalgar this tendency reached absurd proportions when French gun crews continued to fire high into the rigging of British ships despite the fact that both Admiral Horatio Nelson and his opponent Admiral Pierre Charles de Villeneuve were resolved on a battle of annihilation. In these circumstances, French tactics served no purpose other than to spare British casualties and hasten their own demise.
In short, the French Navy’s inferiority prompted it to develop tactics for preserving itself in battle. These tactics were defensive and proved unsuited for winning crushing victories. At best, a well-handled French fleet employing these tactics could force the British to disengage, as occurred at Minorca in 1756 or the Chesapeake in 1781 and although forcing an enemy to retire could have a strategic effect, it could not win command of the sea.
Conclusion
Sea power, unlike land power, tended to perpetuate itself during the classic period of sailing battle fleets. The dissuasive costs of developing a naval infrastructure, the interdependence of naval and merchant marines and the pathological character of tactics all facilitated the efforts of a dominant naval power to preserve its status. The fallibility of maritime alliances also impeded efforts by coalitions of maritime states to counterbalance the dominant naval power. Put together, these factors help explain the unprecedented rise and reign of British naval power.
None of these findings undermines either Mahan’s remarks on insularity or Kennedy’s on economics. Britain would not have been able to sustain its naval power if French or Russian armies could have invaded it across a vulnerable frontier. Also, a sclerotic economy would have hardly supported the economic burdens of building and maintaining fleets. However, neither of these factors is sufficient to explain an unprecedented event—one state dominating the world’s oceans for more than two centuries, from 1692 to 1922.